Monday, July 10, 2017

STATE VOTING BOSS RIGHT TO RESIST FEDERAL DEMANDS

Hand over all the information you have on every
voter in your state, went the demand from President Trump’s newly appointed
Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity. That included a list of all
registered voters’ names, birth dates, party identification and voting histories,
plus the last four digits of all voters’ Social Security numbers.

So much for the old-fashioned secret ballot.

So sweeping was the demand that even the
commission’s vice chairman and de facto chief – the man who signed the order –
said his own state of Kansas would refuse to turn over Social Security numbers
to his own commission.

What would the federal government do with all this
information, if it were turned in? The commission and that vice chairman,
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, won’t say. But it’s common knowledge
that should the data get into demonstrably hackable federal computers, it would
be fair game for almost anyone from corporations to foreign powers like Russia,
which already has an alleged history of stealing electoral data bases.

This was the second major assault by Trump’s
administration on citizen privacy, the first coming when his appointees to the
Federal Communications Commission announced in May they plan to rescind
previous “net neutrality” rules that prohibit commercial use of customer
information held by Internet service providers.

California was the first state to react to the voter
information demands, with Secretary of State Alex Padilla announcing the day
the demands arrived that he would fill none of them. Within a week, he was
joined by the top voting officials of 43 other states, including many
considered rock-ribbed Republican red, like Kentucky, Indiana and Mississippi.

Said Padilla, “I will not provide sensitive voter
information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that
millions of Californians voted illegally (in 2016). California’s participation
would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive
voter fraud made by the President, the vice president and Mr. Kobach.”

His GOP counterpart in Mississippi was more
colorful. “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great
state to launch from,” said Delbert Hosemann. Louisiana Republican Tom Schedler
added that “The commission has quickly politicized its work by asking for an
incredible amount of voter data that I have (always) refused to release.”

Fortunately for voters who could be at risk for
identity theft if Padilla and his colleagues complied with commission demands,
Kobach’s group (formally headed by Vice President Mike Pence) has no subpoena
powers and there is no known penalty for not cooperating. Maybe that’s why
Kobach is refusing one of his own demands. It is also true that the
Constitution gives each state the power to conduct its own elections.

But Padilla was probably correct, too,
in guessing that Kobach & Co. have already decided what their report (due
in mid-2018) will say. He’s the one who spurred Trump to claim that his loss of
the popular vote to Hillary Clinton last year was solely because of illegal
immigrant voters.

Neither Trump nor Kobach ever
presented evidence for the claim of massive illegal voting, a charge Kobach has
made for at least 10 years, since his days as a lawyer for the Federation for
American Immigration Reform, long classed as a hate group by the Southern
Poverty Law center.

As secretary of state, Kobach has
tried for years to ferret out illegal aliens voting in Kansas. Wikipedia
reports that as of last spring, he had found six cases of illegal voting in his
six-plus years in office; all involved double voting, none by undocumented
persons.

As Padilla noted, there is no basis
for or proof of claims that massive illegal immigrant voting occurs or ever
has. Republicans first made the claim when Democrat Loretta Sanchez in 1996
ousted longtime Orange County GOP Congressman Robert Dornan, one of the biggest
upsets ever in California politics. The GOP majority in the House investigated
then for electoral irregularities, but found so few even it had to admit the
phenomenon was insignificant.

The bottom line: This is one more form
of California resistance to Trump administration attempts at actions that are
political anathema here. Resistance has never been more justified than in this
case.

-30-
Elias is author of the current book
“The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the
Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third
edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

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About Me

Thomas Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column, appearing twice weekly in 88 newspapers around California, with circulation over 2.2 million.
He has won numerous awards from organizations like the National Headliners Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the California Taxpayers Association. He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in distinguished commentary.
Elias is the author of two books, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It" (now in its third edition; also published in Japanese and recently optioned for a television movie) and "The Simpson Trial in Black and White," co-authored with the late Dennis Schatzman.